I hate the fact that I'm even going to discuss this, but I am so tired of certain aspects of baseball. Anyone who has ever followed baseball and any other sport realizes that baseball keeps track of the most useless statistics as compared to other sports. For goodness sakes, I believe that baseball would keep track of the statistic "highest batting average with runners in scoring position with two outs and nobody on base" if it were at all possible to achieve this situation. With that as a background, I want to tell you precisely why I cannot wait for this baseball season to be over.
When I woke up this morning, I turned on ESPN's program SportsCenter, which I sometimes do at the beginning of the day. I was soon updated with the fact that the Boston Red Sox had lost to the Cleveland Indians in game four of the American League Championship Series (ALCS), 7-3, but was also informed by ESPN's Tim Kurkjian that (and I'm paraphrasing) prior to the eleventh inning of game two of the 2007 ALCS, the Cleveland Indians had never scored seven runs in an inning in a postseason game. And also scoring seven runs in the fifth inning of game four, these two big innings were a big reason why Cleveland is very close to moving on to the World Series (they're up 3-1 in the ALCS). If you guessed that my first thought when hearing this was "wow, that's some excellent insight," you would be very wrong. No, my first thought was "wow, that was an incredibly useless statistic, and at the same time it's completely obvious that those two innings are important in Cleveland having built such a lead in the series." My gosh, what would Kurkjian have started off with if Cleveland had only scored six runs in the eleventh inning of game two and six runs in the fifth inning of game four? (Assuming Cleveland had scored six runs in a postseason inning prior to game two of this series...)
So there you have it; I'm looking forward to the end of this baseball season and a cessation of useless statistics being stated for a few months. Oh wait, the NBA is about to start, and they endlessly tell us useless stats like "the team in the league with the most points scored from the 10:57 mark of the first quarter to the 1:43 mark of the second quarter." No, I'm just kidding. Only baseball analysts would think it was useful to search for and relay such useless information.
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2 comments:
I think you just don't like Tim Kirkjian. I don't either. Go Rockies.
Although I don't like Kurkjian, I still think that all of stats that some of these analysts come up with to sound like they are saying something important are total crap.
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